Hôtes du langage: Claudel, Mauriac, Bernanos, Green par Carole Auroy (review)

The four authors named in the subtitle are generally considered to be the most significant Catholic writers of the twentieth century in France. This volume offers close readings of key texts in four genres (autobiography, lyrical prose poetry, drama, and novel), showing how the writers used their poetic imagination in conjunction with their meditation on biblical and theological material to negotiate both the 'inconfort intellectuel' of the 'ère du soupçon' and the 'inconfort moral' of their own emotional struggles (p. 10). Carole Auroy has already made a name for herself in Green studies (Julien Green: Le Miroir enéclats.Étude de l''Autobiographie' (Paris: Cerf, 2000)), and earlier versions of the three chapters devoted to Jeunes Années, Chaque Homme dans sa nuit, and Adrienne Mesurat, have appeared in volumes of conference papers, as has part of a chapter on Mauriac's L'Agneau. The chapters on Mauriac's autobiographical works (Mémoires intérieurs / Nouveaux Mémoires intérieurs), on Claudel (Connaissance de l'Est, Partage de midi / Le Soulier de Satin), and on Bernanos (Sous le soleil de Satan, Journal d'un curé de campagne), are new and equally stimulating (and a pleasure to read). The analyses draw helpfully on the hermeneutics of Ricœur and the mimetic theory of Girard, as well as on Lévinas and Urs von Balthasar, to show how the writers engage with language, silence, darkness, evil, violence, and grace, refusing the systematizations or the speculative solutions of orthodox Christian discourse while maintaining a central focus on the 'quête de transcendance' (p. 337). The question of the nature of true sacrifice runs through the whole work, from the sublime but often narcissistic forms characteristic of Claudel's plays to the humbler self-giving explored in several of the other texts. The imaginative power and 'posture interrogative' of these writers free them from being merely representatives of an outdated way of understanding the world, ensuring their place at the forefront of the dominant modern literary current 'qui place en son centre les tensions de la condition humaine et l'affrontement du désir de sens à ses opacités' (p. 522).